Before joining The New York Times last year, I had never covered a wildfire. I knew a lot, though, about a different kind of disaster: hurricanes. My first full-time reporting job was at The Sun Herald in Biloxi, Miss. I started in 2020, during one of the most active hurricane seasons on record. As the storms approached, I stood in the rain to talk to people filling sandbags. After the worst was over, I wore galoshes to interview residents desperately draining floodwaters from their houses. When driving into an area just hit by a hurricane, there are indications of what lies ahead before you see the devastation: downed trees and power lines, water pooling where it shouldn't, warped fast-food signs. That's why, driving into Altadena for the first time last month, I expected some kind of warning before I reached the total destruction wrought by the Eaton fire. Instead, I looked left to make a turn and suddenly saw black, twisted ruins where a house should have been. Next door and across the street were homes that looked perfectly untouched. Hurricane-force winds had propelled embers at random, sparking house fires that firefighters couldn't stop. The result was a jarring contrast that only heightened the sense of upheaval. This had been no hurricane. A hurricane may gather strength rapidly or change direction just before landfall, but it typically arrives with days of warning. It follows a path and often weakens with time. The Eaton fire seemed to follow its own windblown path, but it grew faster than many people could prepare for, and then lingered for weeks afterward. Hurricanes are slow, colossal beasts. Wildfires can be colossal beasts, too, but fast and mean. Hurricanes overwhelm structures but often leave them behind; fires consume them. Hurricanes smelled different, too. After Hurricane Helene in the Tampa area last year, I visited families cleaning mud from their homes and laying out photographs to dry in the sun. The air smelled like salt, sewage and traces of mildew. In Altadena, two weeks after the fire, the faint smell of smoke still lingered over the ash and dust. As I spoke with Altadena residents picking through the rubble of their lives, I thought about Trey Camardelle. The house where Mr. Camardelle's parents lived was destroyed in Hurricane Zeta in 2020. The storm was nowhere near as destructive as the Eaton fire, but it damaged roofs, downed power lines and knocked his parents' house right off its 18-foot cinder block pilings. The day after the storm hit, Mississippi's governor met with Mr. Camardelle, and then began a news conference. While the governor spoke to a gathering of reporters, Mr. Camardelle was in the distance, walking around the jumble of wood and insulation, the battered house sitting off-kilter on top. This, he told me, was an "entire life, just gone." In Altadena, the disaster was different, but the loss was much the same.
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